This Is the Night (27 page)

“How do you know he’s undercover?”

“How
don’t
you know? Walk slowly. Just follow me, okay?”

Alan’s eyes again trace the outline of her face. She’s not full-on Majority Group. No, she’s a halfie, he thinks, almost positive. There were a few untouchable girls like this at school, alpha women who struck blows in every passing boy’s heart, some Homeland Indigenous grandparent who entered the bloodline long ago only to rise in certain members of their Majority Group descendants, but with enough subtlety to register only the softest projection of difference.

Gripping his arm, she angles the two of them back into the waiting crowds of the bus station, slipping them away from the Reggie. Alan can see that she is somewhere around his age. After treating himself to a brief stare, he can also see that she is very, very beautiful.

Her name is Terry, she tells him, her family owned the smallest mansion on an Eastern Sector block of very large ones, and yes, her grandfather was Homeland Indigenous, Group T, or maybe P, she can’t quite remember right now. She has dropped out of a three-digit university and left the hollow-hearted people she came from to find, she tells him, the real.

“The what?” he asks, just to make sure he has heard her correctly.

They sit on a somehow unoccupied corner bench of the still crowded depot. However long that line for the bathroom Gad is in, Alan finds himself wishing it longer.

He likes, he decides, the bones of her face, the curve of her cheeks, the slope of her forehead. An idea presses itself forward. “You know,” Alan tells her, drawing directly from the pages of
Tiny Rock
,
“I can teach you the ways of my people.” Though his ethics and morals threaten suicide as these words leave his mouth, the rest of his body—the part that wants to fuck her in some wayward stall of this crowded bus station—cheers these empty words on. He leans back to gauge her reaction and finds himself gazing at her beautiful hands and feet.

Terry bursts into laughter. “Seriously? I may not know what the real is, but I know that you don’t believe what you just said any more than I do.” She has the confidence, Alan sees, of someone who has sat across from any number of slavering men.

He nods shamefully and admits the source of his inspiration. Terry launches into a lecture, learned, apparently, at that three-digit university, about how the author of
Tiny Rock
took a false name, sold his book as a meditation on some slice of Indigenous life, and cemented his way into libraries and classrooms throughout the country. Plus, she says, the author is a huge proponent of expanding the war, just one final surge, and if sixteen-year-olds are what it takes—

“So he’s not Homeland Indigenous?” Alan asks.

“Once we thought he was,” Terry says, “and now we know he’s not.”

“Oh.”

“Does that matter to you?” she asks.

Alan shakes his head. “I just thought it was a pretty shitty book.”

She opens her mouth wide and laughs again, a small seed revealing itself between her two front teeth. Her neck is a smooth maze of soft lines. Even the smallest bones within him are terrified. She is that beautiful.

As the conversation floats on—a perfect admixture of jokes, insights, damages sustained, influences, and the beliefs that shape them—Alan realizes that this is the longest conversation he has ever had with a woman. Gone for now are thoughts of some mercenary sent to chase him, his lack of Currencies, the unknown location of his next night’s sleep, his doubts about his ability to find the baldheads and pass their test so he can be introduced to Woody Gilbert. Those distant worries are not a stunning woman with a small seed in her teeth, sitting next to him.

Around him, people begin to cheer.
The Expressway has been reopened,
the loudspeaker rumbles.
Please approach the window if you need to make new travel arrangements.

“I have to ask,” she says, “or to warn you, really.”

A convoy of buses pulls into the station.

“Are you going? Has the Registry gotten to you?”

Now boarding.

“Sorry, that’s my bus. Now answer my question.”

He wonders whether this might be some sort of test, so he says nothing.

She shows a joyful blaze of teeth, her cheeks rising into her eyes. “Good,” she says. “Never reveal your status to anyone.” She places a hand on his shoulder. “The quotas, the one hundred percent conscription rate for Homeland Indigenous that everyone talks about? They’re reading the wrong papers. It’s not real.”

“How do you know?”

“You still have a chance—”

Now boarding.

“I have a plan,” Alan hears himself say. “Hiding isn’t something I want to do. In fact”—he can feel the fire within himself now—“I want to make
them
hide from
me
.”

She mumbles something about male ego that he doesn’t quite catch.

“Have you ever been to Western City North?” he asks. “Do you know about the baldheads?”

She snorts and tells him that she has just come from there, that she has seen plenty of baldheads around town and that all they do is play some strange psychological game. “They can’t get you out of war,” she tells him. “You need to prioritize. So keep this in mind: the quotas are a trick. They just want you to think it’s inevitable. Those are dirty papers that report on that, government funded.” She reaches out to touch him, her soft fingers landing on his wrist. “But don’t get caught up in anything stupid. You’re a person, you’re not a group, understand? The only change that violence brings is to create a more violent world.”

He understands that she is warning him against HIM, against the ideas put forth by the pamphlets he has hidden in his now swelling pants. But what does she know? Of course she’d say the baldheads just play games; curing addicts was their cover. Sure, she is beautiful, but her beauty hasn’t led her to the information on the crushed paper folded into small squares and now resting just below his backbone. She thinks that the baldheads are just some cult of wackos. Which means that she doesn’t understand that for real freedom, you need to sink below. Not that her inability to comprehend makes her any less attractive. He would like to kiss her stomach, behind her ears, the back of her neck. He decides to give it a try.

“You must be kidding,” she says.

Now boarding. Now boarding.

“Fine,” he tells her. “Your loss.”

With a tight smile, she reminds him to always keep his Registry status to himself. If someone does ask, make sure to—

Last call for boarding. Final call.

“Whatever,” he says, standing up. “I can take care of myself.”

With the buses once again running, the crowds around him have thinned. Still, the bathroom line must have been insane. Navigating his way through the remaining crowd, he is already weaving together for Gad the story of how he has kissed a girl. He knows that if another person believes the new facts now forming on the edge of his mouth, they will in some way become true.

He arrives at the bathroom. There is no line; every stall is empty. The depot buzzes with people, but Gad is not among them.

Alan leans against a small piece of wall. Back at the School, he had watched over Gad’s shoulder as he filled out the Registry form:
Name and Address of Person Who Will Always Know Your Address.
Gad had printed Alan’s name, and Alan had done the same. Alan looks around for Gad. But Gad isn’t anywhere.

25.

Bitter, flashing cold, the cruel Interior City atmosphere. Lance could feel it before he debused, felt the polar air slice his lips as he and the passengers of the Broken Bus floated down the aisle, groggy from so many hours in motion. A hopping, one-footed man gripped his arm for balance. Eyes drawn to the man’s waist, Lance saw a small protruding pouch that lifted his shirt and gave Lance a clear view of a torn and ruptured stomach.

“Bomb metal,” the man said. “Passed through my spleen on the left and my liver on the right. Left my intestines alone at least.”

Too many hours on this bus with the men whose weaponized bodies had doubled as targets for the Foreigns. Men just like his brothers, save for the beat of their hearts and the flow of their blood.

He led the one-footed vet to a chair in the main terminal of the depot, whereupon the two of them, along with everyone else, were plunged into darkness. No surprise; Lance had arrived in a blackout.

Through the second-story windows, small stars shone bright above the powerless city, and the thought came to Lance that the small nips in the sky added up to some celestial set of directions, complete with a smiling Lorrie at the endpoint. He zipped up his coat, pushed outside, and looked upward, ready to follow. The bitter air cracking his skin reminded him that although he was far from his hometown of dead brothers, he was now much closer than he preferred to be. But those old versions of who he had been didn’t matter now. Finding Lorrie wasn’t just a task. It was an obligation.

And yet, where was his courage? Too much fire, he thought, and not enough light. To be so close to her, to be so ready, was nearly unbearable. He needed to calm down, to dull the waving rushes of oncoming delight. He needed a cup of coffee.

Nothing was familiar. As he walked the strange, blacked-out city, a roaring wind followed him around every corner, hurling itself against his face in cold slaps. Soon a hum and a whirr brought the lights back to life. Finally he could see. And on the corner of the newly lit block, there, shining through the bitter night, were the lights of a coffee shop.

Lance pushed open the doors and immediately felt at home, then confused, then at home again, though still confused. The owners had clearly studied the coffee shops of Western City North and done their best to replicate the experience here in Interior City. But then something even stranger: there, in the back corner, on an old couch near the entrance to the restroom, reading a book, sipping tea, and biting her fingernails, was Lorrie.

Her cavernous apartment was fouled and filthy, very un-Lorrie-like. Once Lance had seen the coffee shop girl up close—her Lorrie-like features almost immediately transfigured into some defective substitute—he had nearly turned away, ready to move on. But at the moment of his gloomy recognition that his luck was not what he thought it was, the strange face in front of him had broken into a sad sizzle of a smile. Sure, this woman wasn’t Lorrie. But so what? To regain the love and affection of the real Lorrie would take some work. For now, this shadow Lorrie was as close as he could bear.

Back at her place, the unspoken agreement became clear: this woman—had she even said her name?—loved a man who had no more life in him, and Lance, well, Lance knew what his problems were and hadn’t felt the need to share them. The two of them recognized the various types of starvation in their hearts, and now, in her grim and cluttered space, they were ready to punish each other for not being who they wanted the other to be. Thank goodness for the many windows of her apartment, Lance thought, because the lights, as usual, were out again. He reached out to hold her, to feel the differences between themselves. Small waist, his hands told him. Large lips.

They stood in her hallway.

“Chase me.”

“What?” he said.

“You heard me.”

And she began to run.

He chased her from living room to bedroom, her clothes falling from her body. He could see this was a game she had played with her dead solider, and he found that being someone else—a someone who was chasing a long-legged, naked stranger—was an effective salve for keeping the world away. Forget the war. Forget the old fuck running the country who was unable to die. Yes, he thought. Yes yes yes. And then he caught her.

She was not ready, not wet enough, and he knew as he pushed into her that she would feel pain. Not that such dryness felt good for him, either, but at least he was in control. Her upper lip quivered, and her discomfort only made him want to push harder, deeper. And so he did.

“That’s it?” she said when he had finished.

Lance nodded and turned over on his back. At some point the lights had come on, and in the terrible moment when he finally looked at her, he could see how little her bulged-out cheeks and rounded nose resembled Lorrie at all. She sat next to him, propped up on one elbow, ready to listen. This posture, at least, Lance appreciated, because he found himself ready.

“You know why I’m here?” he told her. “I’m not from around here.”

“Listen, I was thinking, maybe you could—”

“I just got off a bus, from Western City North.”

“Great. So listen, I didn’t quite get to—”

“Three days I was on that bus. That’s a long time. Awhile back I took this same drive, under other circumstances—really different circumstances, you could say—but things were way different this time around. Last trip, I wasn’t looking for anything, and this trip I am.”

“Aren’t we all.” She ran her fingers over Lance’s chest. “So I’ve got a little proposal.”

Lance frowned. “I’m trying to tell you a story here.”

“About who?”

“About me.” He paused. “My story.”

She laughed. “How about you skip story time and we move on to something a little more grown up?”

“This trip, this one I just took to come here, there was so much garbage. Four ovens, I counted, tossed in ditches on the side of the road, and that was just when I was awake. I mean, I left some stuff behind, too. Well, I tried to donate my art. Anyway, I took this run-down bus full of mangled vets and . . .” His own story was jumbled, leaping from his mouth without strand or pattern to hold it in place. He tried again. “What I mean is, I first drove across the Homeland with this woman who was, who is, really important to me. The three of us, her friend Terry was there, too. And we went. I mean, we found . . .”

What kind of story, Lance thought, was he trying to tell? He couldn’t even properly string a bunch of verbs together.

The woman reached under the sheets and began to stroke him, tugging just a little too hard in desperation to bring him back to life.

“Hey, how many anti-Registry centers are here?” Lance asked suddenly.

“Here where?” Still stroking.

“Here-here. Interior City.”

“What, you scared to go?” She laughed. “Real original.” She continued her clawlike stroke. “How about I save the welcome-to-Interior-City tour for later?” she said, her voice dropping down to a soft whisper. “How about you do something for me. I’ll tell you what I like. What I want is for you to take my—”

“How many?” Lance interrupted, pulling away. He heard his voice grow slower, louder. “How many centers are there in Interior City?”

She lowered her eyebrows for a moment, but then seemed to think better of it and continued. “You’ll have to spank it out of me.”

At that moment, Lance sprang up, pushed the woman onto her back, and sat with his legs spread across her torso, flattening her breasts and pressing her into the mattress. Out came his hand, and his four fingers pressed on one side of her throat, his thumb on the other.

“How about you just answer my question?”

He could feel the rapid bumps of her heart pressing against the underside of his thigh, the swooshing of the blood in her neck.

“What are you doing?” she yelped. He squeezed harder, long fingers around tight neck. “Why?” she gasped.

“How many?” he roared.

Water flooded her sclera and drowned her small pupils until two small tears dripped across her cheeks.

Harder still.

“I just want to know how many anti-Registry centers are in this city! Is that too much to ask?” More force, a tighter grip. Beneath his fingers he could feel the air struggling to pass.

She wheezed and stared at him from beneath his hand, silent and still, until she finally gasped out the answer. “One. Just one. Two if you count those Fareon freaks.”

She offered up an address, and he let go, her throat begging for air on the bed. Enough with this hollow apartment. He was ready to head toward the real version of this woman, leaving behind this sorry imitation who he hoped would cease to exist the moment his feet touched the outside pavement.

“You’re no good,” the woman said to him, her voice raw, the sheets pulled up to her neck as he slid on his pants. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”